A New Year and New AWS Exams

Firstly I’d like to wish a Happy New Year to everyone. Apologies for the lack of posts recently as I’ve taken a bit of a break from the studying following re:Invent and the festive period.

January has started as last year finished from a work perspective with lots of things currently on the go at the moment and hence why I’ve been trying to recharge myself before continuing with any of the AWS certifications.

Last Friday I attended an event at the AWS UK Headquarters for re:Invent 2.0 comes to London which was focused on the Public Sector. Whilst there wasn’t any new announcements since it was aimed at people that weren’t able to attend Las Vegas for re:Invent, it was designed to bring to life some of new releases to the platform at a. high level. Personally for myself, it was a good opportunity to listen to the talk on Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Fargate and EKS were two new announcements from re:Invent and I didnt have the opportunity to attend any of the breakout sessions related to those services whilst I was there so it was a good opportunity to learn about them. I’m going to try and spend some time learning more about containers such as Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos and the use cases for them as opposed to traditional IaaS.

Amazon recently announced that they had released the Security Speciality back into beta again. There has been quite a lot of anticipation around the release of this since it was initially announced prior to re:Invent in 2016 when it first went into beta at the same time as the Advanced Networking and Big Data Speciality exams.

However for reasons that are unknown the Security exam was pulled from the beta after having the results being pushed back for nearly 7 months whilst the Advanced Networking and Big Data were released into fully fledged certifications. I have always been quite interested in pursuing this specialty but I’m a little reluctant to until its out of the beta as there is a lot of effort and study that go into these and for no reward if it gets pulled again.

Therefore last night I thought to try and get myself back into the swing of the exam situation I’d book the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam for today. This exam is aimed at people that have a basic understanding of IT services and their uses in the AWS Cloud platform.

The exam was 65 questions with a time limit of 90 minutes. From my own knowledge I personally didn’t do any study as it’s a pre-associate exam. So in depth knowledge isn’t required but a high level understanding of the AWS Infrastructure (Regions and Availability Zones), the varying AWS Services and the types of purchasing models there are within AWS (On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Dedicated) with the associated use cases.

If you’re an AWS APN Partner (Amazon Partner Network) there are a number of free to use online training courses that you can take: